However, I tend to cringe whenever someone starts talking about SEO, because I’m waiting to hear the advertisement of shady tactics and bad practices.

There’s are ethical and easy-to-understand ways to integrate SEO for into your home service business. I’m going to share what I did for a home service business in the Sacramento area, plus the tools you can use for improving your home service business SEO.

If you’re really serious about SEO, LinkedIn Learning has great courses on SEO as well.

Now, here’s what I did to improve SEO for a small business.

What I did to improve SEO for a home service company

#1. Perform a daily audit

Auditing your site using an SEO tool is the first step toward improving your home service business SEO. I started auditing using these three tools:

UberSuggest: This free tool by Neil Patel gives you a great overview of your site’s top SEO pages, keyword suggestions, content ideas, plus a look at how you compare with the competition.

Google Search Console: This free tool lets you see which keywords are bringing visitors to your website, plus some other features.

ManageWP: This paid tool will monitor keywords and send you reports on how your site ranks in comparison to others.

The bottom line was that I started monitoring SEO daily to be able to carefully observe what was happening.

#2. Focus on improving one page per day

A big mistake in SEO is to try to fix everything all at once, like eating an elephant in one bite. Bad idea.

Rather than try to fix everything at once, I focused on the most visited pages one at a time. Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, I could see which pages were getting most traffics and from which keywords.

The Rank Math plugin for WordPress allows you to see a score ranking your content based on the best current SEO practices.

#3. Use keywords for developing new content

After auditing and optimizing the existing pages, I conducted some keyword research using to determine what future content should be created as blog posts.

Home service businesses face a challenge where they’re trying to rank high for a specific service, but also rank high for a specific service area. A page that ranks well for “Folsom gutter cleaning” may not rank well for “Sacramento gutter cleaning” and vice versa.

Some businesses and SEO experts recommend ranking for different service area by duplicating content and just changing the service area name.

An alternative is to create a blog post with original content that’s less likely to get penalized for duplication. This blog post can be customized for the particular season, be written to address frequently asked questions, and more easy shared.